Heath Cullen – Springtime in the heart
The ways music makes are endless, like those of the Lord for those who have faith. And so it happens in a completely random way to hear about a distant Australian musician, to contact his European distributor who is in Scandinavia, to receive his record, to sit down to listen to it and to be struck at the heart. Because this songwriter suspended among so many flattering models of the past and his irrempent original personality, takes us by the hand and leads us on a musical and poetic literary journey at the same time quiet, powerful, sensitive, original, sincere, bare to the idea of absolute essentiality in the bright musical choices that accompany his singing. A voice, that of Heath Cullen, which seems to flow from the harsh nature of his land, and then a simple but extremely suggestive use of guitars, a rhythm that supports him, the addition of winds in songs in which the atmosphere turns on the rarefied. A handful of songs that seem to spring from each other, compositions by Cullen himself, minus two magnificent songs of others, one by the far-sighted Joe Henry (who produces the record, absolute guarantee, listen to his “Scar” of 2001, a jewel) and one by T Bone Burnett (for fine palates). And with Heath Cullen we lie between the plains and the Australian highlands and among what these spaces have in common with the still current myth of the American West, or with atmospheres of stories of the best novelists of the frontier. Or all the frontiers to cross, with the taste of the discovery of an artist and his musical journey, which hopefully and still imagines itself full of suggestive stages.
Sergio Spada
